The Israeli government is running between ten fronts — and winning none

Any study, discussion, or empty talk on a security-military topic should begin with the data stating that "274 children have been killed since the ceasefire in October, or one child per day on average" (Nir Hasson, Haaretz). A week ago, about 15 people were killed, including two children. It is clear that the IDF does not want, and certainly does not intend, to kill children. This is just "collateral damage." Routine terminology that explains the cumulative number of more than 20,000 children, and the count continues since the revenge campaigns began, some of them justified, most of them foolish and harmful land grabs to this day.

These days, the government is managing about ten combat fronts. On the military side — Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip, Iran, and the West Bank; on the civilian side — fighting against the judicial system, the media, and the education system, against the liberal-democratic public, and against truth as a basis for life. The goal of these wars is to escape trial, maintain the coalition, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and establish a Halachic state whose capital is Jerusalem forever and ever, and in its heart, the Temple.

The government's policy has led the IDF into wars that it has no and had no chance of winning in any of them. Entering with armored divisions into civilian population centers and destroying entire villages guarantees returns of a poisoned public, low returns, and moral bankruptcy in the global sector due to apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and horrific scenes of rubble and scattered corpses. This is what the world sees.

The hoped-for round in Iran is a fake military goal that is supposed to provide only a background of smoke plumes and a soundtrack of bombs for a patriotic entry into the elections. It hasn't happened, yet. If Benjamin Netanyahu is lucky, the Palestinian resistance in the West Bank will spiral out of control and turn into an intifada. There is nothing like Palestinian blood flowing in the streets and fields to fuel an "offensive" election campaign.

Such a situation requires Gadi Eisenkot to launch a counter-campaign. It is unclear to what extent he is capable of radicalizing (that is, being logical) and attacking the government's "offensive security policy." Especially when the most senior political and security officials report that Jews are threatened just because they are Jews. As Chief of Staff, Eisenkot took up the gauntlet in the case of the sector's hero Elor Azaria, who personally liquidated a wounded man lying on the road in an incident that had already ended. Netanyahu comforted Azaria's parents to please the "offensive" sector, and later turned Force 100 (some cowards who beat a prisoner, including sexual abuse) into a force of hundreds of thousands who support them. They, the settlers and their youth on the ground, have an excellent reason to fear Palestinian blood revenge. Who knows better than them how violent and cruel the war that the IDF, the Shin Bet, the police, and the settlers are waging against them is.

In fact, there is no real fighting in the West Bank. There is a hunt teeming with soldiers, forces, and technology, in the best tradition of the brutal occupation armies, under the pretext (the real one, by the way, which is hard to argue with) of saving human lives. At a light run. So how does the government navigate the supposedly political-diplomatic field? Precisely here the explanation is simple: an industry of lies. The event becomes complicated when the government needs manipulations to escape the world's forceful demands for real negotiations. Mainly provocations when "Jewish blood is spilled like water" and a shadow of an arrangement for stopping the fighting emerges. The paraphrase for managing the conflict at the diplomatic level is to compare the race in all ten arenas of combat to a hurdle race in athletics: the government is currently skipping from hurdle to hurdle and in the process is knocking down hurdle after hurdle, and this is the tricky part of the race: the rules of hurdle racing state that knocking down a hurdle intentionally or illegally causes disqualification, but accidental knocking down while making a real attempt to jump over it does not disqualify the runner. He is allowed to finish the race even if all the hurdles were knocked down, as long as the rules of the race were kept. To our misfortune, the government claims that all the hurdles it knocked down were without malicious intent, and that is the reason it is still running — to nowhere.

Like in Gaza. There too, the IDF is fighting when it is unclear for what and why. On Channel 12, there is a diligent, dedicated, and sensitive reporter named Almog Boker, who comes to help and states that "the IDF's interest is to prevent Hamas from thinking about an attack." This is, of course, complete nonsense. Hamas is currently negotiating an arrangement under the auspices of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. If the IDF continues to bite into populated areas, eliminate activists, and here and there, God forbid, a girl or boy is killed to "prevent Hamas from thinking about an attack," Hamas may respond with guerrilla sorties. A rhino in a minefield.

To prevent the IDF from continuing such stupid and murderous thinking, the world is preparing an alternative plan for the IDF, and (surprise!) the Israeli government and the narrow cabinet are accepting it. And this is the place for an enlightening side trip to examine what is more important: saving Bibi or saving Gaza. The data is as follows: Donald Trump refuses to accept Bibi for a meeting. What does he have to do with the most hated politician in the USA and the world? Witkoff and Kushner are stuck in implementing the Peace Council plan, and they are conditioning Trump's agreement to the meeting on the cabinet's decision in Israel regarding the entry of the Palestinian technocratic committee into Gaza. Last Sunday, the cabinet approved the entry of the Palestinian committee, and the next day the White House approved the summit of losers in Washington. At the meeting, Bibi confirmed with his own voice the entry of the technocratic committee (a cover name for a government of experts whose role is to establish a Palestinian state), which will operate "as soon as the Peace Council and the Security Council approve the deployment of forces, and when the Israeli army withdraws." A week later, Bibi and the cabinet retracted that agreement.

And indeed, Yaniv Asor — the knitted-kippah Major General of the Southern Command — is moving the yellow line cubes and uprooting Palestinians to tighten the pressure cooker that is the humanitarian-sanitary hell in which two million Palestinians are cooking. At the same time, he approves a demonstration of thousands of settlers who were brought to the yellow line border to prove ownership of the strip on the way to Gush Katif. Like that? And here comes a blunt American squeeze, a lever for a public order that Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir landed on Asor: any violent activity in the strip goes through his approval. In the West Bank, the private army of Avi Bluth, the commander of the command and a knitted-kippah settler, rules. And then comes Defense Minister Israel Katz, a caricature of a rhino in a minefield, and demands to release from house arrest an abusive settler who was marked as a bad element even for Bezalel Smotrich's general elections. But that same settler is a supporter of Katz's primaries. And here comes the beautiful part of the story: Bluth's political lever on Bibi is stronger than Katz's lever. Bluth appealed the minister's decision and also received the backing of the Chief of Staff, whose opinion on the wild expansions of Bluth's farms is unclear. Yes, yes, that's how far the madness of the systems goes. If you are asking, and rightly so, where the Chief of Staff is, the answer is an excellent question. The last thing Zamir wishes for himself is fights over authorities that will trickle down to the soldiers in the field. If I understand correctly the fragments of impressions that float here and there, Zamir's intention is to wait like the last citizen for a new government and a new policy.